a thank you for you — and your light — Thank you, dear readers Heaven’s manna, being heard You are Grace and Feast — dark Before now crystal caves echoing flames of Afters ©Jenine Bsharah Baines 2021 I’ve been intrigued by the idea of a crystal cave ever since I read Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave when I was 14…

Take a walk with me… — “In the end, we’re all just walking each other home.” Ram Dass The above quote says it all for me. I could so easily make it my entire bio…Except I suspect Quy Ma expects a bit more out of me than this. (Insert smile emoji.)

That crow’s my daddy. The Psychic said so. — A great mind must be androgynous. Samuel Taylor Coleridge It’s not like crows have boobs so perhaps Lew is a girl. But Lew, says a psychic, is my father, and I’m not arguing. Lew and I shared a lovely moment. His wings catching my eye from the kitchen window. Bedazzling, unblinding my heart. Conjuring me…

Yet another love song to the Wolf Moon — “..for unless I am myself, I am nobody” ~Virginia Woolf Finally I got clean sheets on the bed and turned off the lamp, except – wouldn’t you know – anthracite theta waves kept jostling my raft like snores from a bedmate. As 3 a.m. crested, my vessel surrendered to the Lighthouse’s…

Aging as expansion — When you wish upon a star, your dreams come true. Leigh Harline/Disney * elder universe yet ever young — shall we hitch graced stars to your sails? ** black holes — like older age — spill sparking epiphanies — incarnations *** expand into meteoric expansiveness — Youth’s constraints flotsam **** may…

A poem inspired by my mother’s painting — The Greek Old Testament usually translates amen as “so be it” Encyclopedia Britannica She’s dressed in gossamer winter whites, brocade skirt spilling lava flows of wine reds. Poised to whiteout an i and pose as spring – broad hat presaging green brims for barren limbs, intoxicating summer’s thirst for shade. A scarlet tanager…

What Will They Think of Me? — i texted his boss, asking for his phone number and now here i resound, within a peal of cold sweat – appassionato deletes, keyed in C# foreshadowing yet another knife, my heart on the cutting board while a gnat inbred with a moth lands upon the baroque white plains of my…